Zenescope Entertainment 2016
Written by Pat Shand
Illustrated by Leonardo Colapietro
Coloured by
Lettered by
With Hades away on business, Liesel joins cryptozoologist Taylor and her husband, a hunter named Franklin, to hunt the mothman. After Franklin is killed in action, Taylor creates a temporary body from monster parts to house Franklin’s brain, which is kept partially functional due to the mothman venom. When the ghoulish monster breaks free, Liesel and Hades’s daughter, Hellchild, attempt to stop it... but Taylor stabs Liesel and Hellchild is beaten almost to death.
The evolution of the Frankenstein style monster here has been exceptionally well done. In this universe of Highborns, monsters and those that fight them a modern day creation of the monster isn’t that far fetched. That it was gone about through the best of intentions only to have it go so incredibly wrong is just par for the course. While I am a little upset that Taylor and Franklin were introduced as throwaway characters for this arc after seeing the potential they could bring to the Zenescope Universe I will say that this story really took things to a level I wasn’t expecting.
With these Mothmen being such big players in this story and in ways that the average person, someone like me who didn’t write this, wouldn’t have dreamed of was both perfect and that shining example of the kind of horror that Zenescope is capable of producing. Legendary monsters like the Mothman have proliferated our storytelling for generations in part as campfire stories intended to scare children to that urban legend to be sought out are great cannon for stories like this.
The interiors here are so well done and full. There really is a lot going on here and at times the visuals are our main source of information as to what’s really occurring. That the attention to detail here is so strong that we get to see so much is stupendous. The use of page layouts here are well utilised and control the flow of the story extremely well.
I like the storytelling here. The way Pat is able to get the personal stuff into all the action here is great stuff. That we see Liesel trying to reconcile her personal feeling with both Hades and with Angelica and what she did for her, not to mention what she said, makes her a lot more complete. We’ve already seen more than enough to separate her from her father and become a force of nature in her own way so seeing this constant evolution of her character is always nice to see.
The continuing adventures of Liesel and her cohorts continue to thrill. That we never know what’s going to happen next is one of the main reasons that I love coming back to her. With each new outing she really does become more and more fascinating.